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This Student Life section is the one-stop shop for students to get connected to activities that will feed your spiritual and social life as well as equip you with resources to jump-start your academic career.

Being a part of our Denver Seminary community is about connection. Whether you are an alumni, donor, or friend of the Seminary, we want to stay in touch and hope you'll take part in our programs and events.

Denver Seminary has a wealth of resources that are available to current students, alumni, and the local community. Here you will find access to the Denver Journal, Engage Magazine, and the various initiatives organized by the Seminary.

Want to learn more about our academic degree programs? Take a look at our Master of Divinity, Master of Arts, and Doctor of Ministry programs. Plus, learn about our unique Training & Mentoring program.

This Student Life section is the one-stop shop for students to get connected to activities that will feed your spiritual and social life as well as equip you with resources to jump-start your academic career.

Being a part of our Denver Seminary community is about connection. Whether you are an alumni, donor, or friend of the Seminary, we want to stay in touch and hope you'll take part in our programs and events.

Denver Seminary has a wealth of resources that are available to current students, alumni, and the local community. Here you will find access to the Denver Journal, Engage Magazine, and the various initiatives organized by the Seminary.

Tom Wright's ambitious six-volume series on "Christian Origins and
the Question of God" has taken another giant leap forward. This volume
(the third to date) began as what Wright thought would be an additional
seventy pages at the end of volume 2--Jesus and the Victory of God
(1996)--but it has ballooned into a major work in and of itself. We
should be enormously thankful that it did! This will be the defining
work on the resurrection for decades to come.

Two questions guide the outline of the entire volume: what did early
Christians think happened to Jesus, and how plausible are their beliefs
from a historical perspective?

Wright surveys Old Testament teaching, Jewish and Greco-Roman
developments between the testaments, New Testament documents, and key
post-New Testament thinking on the resurrection. He shows that bodily
resurrection is by far the dominant and pervasive hope in pre-Christian
Jewish sources and that the New Testament witness unanimously refers to
hope of new embodiment--indeed of new creation--in their teachings on
the resurrection. After a predictable chronological sequence for his
surveys of pre-Christian Greco-Roman and Jewish thought, Wright adopts
a more creative outline for dealing with the New Testament material. He
begins with Paul, our earliest written source, but surveys all of
Paul's teaching on resurrection outside the Corinthian correspondence
first, since key texts in 1 and 2 Corinthians are usually those pointed
to by scholars who would argue that Paul believed in something other
than a bodily resurrection. The he surveys those two letters more
generally before finally dealing with 1 Cor. 15 and 2 Cor. 5:1-10 in
the greatest detail. After clearly presenting the signs for Paul's
belief in re-embodiment in the less detailed or controversial texts, he
stresses that the key Corinthian texts yield nothing materially
different. Paul insists that his experience with the resurrected Christ
matches the form of the apostles' encounters (not vice-versa), he knows
of the empty tomb, and his language of "spiritual resurrection" refers
to the new glorified, incorruptible nature of resurrection bodies not
their immateriality. While Paul probably changed his perspective on the
possibility that he might die before the Parousia between 1 and 2
Corinthians, he did not change his theology about the nature of his
resurrection hope.

Nothing in Acts' three accounts of Paul's encounter with Jesus on
the road to Damascus demonstrates that we should change the conclusions
derived from Paul's own autobiographical testimony in the epistles. The
language of "seeing" is that regularly used of objective, historical
events. The differing details in Luke's three retellings of the event
reflect standard stylistic variation among ancient historians and do
not jeopardize the historicity of the event in general. If one wants to
see how an ancient writer described subjective visionary experiences,
one should compare Paul's testimony in 2 Cor. 12:1ff., datable to a
quite different period in his life.

After finishing his treatment of Paul, Wright turns to resurrection
in the rest of early Christianity. Again he deviates from conventional
sequence, for good reason, saving the controversial resurrection
narratives at the end of each of the four Gospels for last. First he
sweeps rapidly through pre-crucifixion testimony in the Gospels, the
rest of the New Testament writings, the Apostolic Fathers, early
Christian apocrypha, early apologists (Justin Martyr, Athenagoras,
Theophilus and Minucius Felix), "the great early theologians"
(Tertullian, Irenaeus, Hippolytus, and Origen), early Syriac
Christianity and finally the Nag Hammadi and related texts. Only when
one comes to the very last of these bodies of literature does one find
resurrection radically redefined as ongoing spiritual existence apart
from re-embodiment. This observation makes it highly unlikely that this
Gnostic and Gnostic-like literature gives us any interpretive window
into what the Christians in the New Testament believed or that it is
anywhere as early as the first century.

Finally, Wright is ready to survey the canonical Gospels'
resurrection narratives, though even then he does so only after
discussing the larger portrayal in those Gospels of Jesus as Messiah
and Lord. Both convictions should have died (or, if they didn't predate
the crucifixion, should never have arisen) apart from resurrection. No
other Messianic pretenders were ever still thought of in these exalted
terms after their deaths; their failures (humanly speaking) meant that
no Jew would now think of them as the long-awaited deliverer, much less
in the even more exalted language of Lordship. On the other hand, the
closing chapters of each of the four Gospels show numerous signs of
historical authenticity. Women, whose testimony was largely
inadmissible in ancient Jewish law courts, are described in all four
accounts as the primary witnesses. Mark's ending has probably been lost
(Wright thinks), but even if not, the young man's prediction that the
resurrected Jesus would appear in Galilee can be taken to be reliable
based on the predictions that have already come true throughout Mark.
No other ancient Jew ever argued that an individual was raised in
advance of the general resurrection depicted in Daniel 12:2; some
remarkable event must have stimulated this deviation. Whatever one does
with the bizarre story of resurrected saints in Matt. 27:51-53, its
theology is congruent with this observation. The distinctive addition
in Luke 24 (the Emmaus road encounter) shows the same kind of
continuity and discontinuity between Jesus, pre- and post-crucifixion,
as does 1 Corinthians 15. The definable end of the resurrection
appearances in both chapters shows that the early Christians believed
they were describing unique, datable events, not some mystical
spiritual communion with the Risen Lord which they might continue to
have. Even John, with all of its apparent theological overlay, goes out
of the way, with Mary, Thomas, and the appearance in Galilee, to stress
the bodily nature of Jesus' resurrection.

Without a doubt, the unanimous reason early Christians gave for the
formation of all these narratives was their conviction that Christ was
genuinely, bodily raised from the dead. Historians today must next ask
if this conviction is plausible. Wright surveys all of the alternate
explanations and finds each seriously wanting. The combination of the
empty tomb accounts plus the narratives of the resurrection appearances
form what he labels both a necessary and a sufficient criterion for the
bodily resurrection of Jesus. It is inadmissible for historians to
claim that we can't weigh in with respect to historical probabilities
with narratives of this kind. It is misguided for theologians to argue
that we shouldn't--the oft-debunked view that faith and history must be
kept separate from each other in entirely different compartments should
be laid to rest once and for all. The Thomas narrative in John 20
points a way forward for the skeptic who doesn't currently have room
for a resurrection in his or her world view. There are times when
historical evidence is so strong that one must allow one's world view
to be challenged or admit that what one writes in the name of doing
history is sheer presupposition or even prejudice.

But if Jesus be raised from the dead, then the early church's
convictions about him being the Christ (Messiah) and Lord are
justified; indeed we may move very close to what later eras of theology
would elaborate under ascriptions of divinity--that "Jesus is the one
sent by God, from God, not only as a messenger but as the very
embodiment of his love. To send some one else is hardly an ultimate
proof of self-giving love" (p. 732). Against the accusation that
classic orthodox Christian belief in Jesus' resurrection reflects an
inappropriate theological triumphalism (so esp. Dominic Crossan),
Wright reminds us, "Such charges have a habit of rebounding--not least
on those who insist on promoting the unstable worldview of late-modern
or postmodern western culture to a position of pre-eminence, and then
try to climb on top of it, claiming it as high moral ground, and
looking down on all who went before them" (p. 735).

Along the way appear all kinds of gold mines of other information.
Repeatedly Wright stresses that ancient Jewish and early Christian
belief in resurrection was not the common contemporary notion of dying
and going to heaven. At best, that reflected the intermediate state of
what happened to a believer after death before the final resurrection. Rather, resurrection is about a new kind of embodied life, after
"life after death." Recent claims that Judaism had a broad spectrum of
views about what happened to a person's body after death and that
bodily resurrection was actually common in Greco-Roman thought both
prove false. The Sadducees were a lone, minority voice in denying
resurrection within Judaism; Euripides' Alcestis stands alone
in dissenting from disembodied immortality as the standard ancient
Greek hope. Another recurring theme is the socio-political significance
of resurrection. Not only does it tie in with the Jewish conviction
(redefined but not jettisoned by Christians) that God was freeing his
people from exile, but it proves the greatest threat and response to
tyrants of every kind who think they wield ultimate power over life and
death. Not surprisingly the clearest and most extensive presentation of
resurrection in pre-Christian Jewish sources comes with the Maccabean
martyrs in 2 Maccabees. Hope of life after life after death enables
believers to remain faithful to God even when it costs them their lives
in this life.

Many of the oft-cited apologetic points in the defense of Christ's
bodily resurrection reappear in this book, with creative twists or
locations--the change of worship from Sabbath to Sunday and the use of
"third day" language, both suggesting something objective and datable;
the defeated nature of the disciples, hardly psychologically postured
for visions or hallucinations of any kind; the oxymoronic nature of a
crucified Messiah in general; the fact that a Greek narrative later
reclothed in Jewish garb might describe a purely spiritual
"resurrection" in bodily form, but not vice-versa as in the actual
historical development of early Christianity from Jewish to Greek
circles; the Nazareth warning against grave robbing coupled with the
improbability of such a ruse accounting for the disappearance of Jesus'
body in the first place; and so on. Other points are comparatively new,
often in response to new challenges. The Gospel of Peter shows no signs
of being early or of having influenced the canonical resurrection
narratives (again contra Crossan); whatever one makes of the
pervasiveness of Old Testament quotes and allusions in the Passion
Narratives (Crossan calls them historicized prophecy and thus deems
them largely fictitious), references, even allusive ones, to the Old
Testament are almost entirely absent from the resurrection narratives.

One of many indicators of the breadth of Wright's work is his
28-page bibliography of secondary literature, with a couple dozen
entires per page, almost all of which Wright engages at some point. Yet
numerous pages of text contain footnotes only to biblical or other
ancient primary sources; Wright is conscious of referring to secondary
literature very selectively! His thesis could in fact have been
bolstered had he interacted with studies of resurrection in the ancient
Near East that make it more plausible that what look like mere hints of
resurrection in the earlier Old Testament books perhaps reflect a more
robust hope after all. Curiously missing from the bibliography are any
of Murray Harris' or Bill Craig's important works on the resurrection.
Harris sums up much of the ANE and related material; Craig convincingly
develops the pneumatikos-psychikos contrast of 1 Cor. 15 as
contrasting "supernatural" with "natural" bodies (not spirits vs.
bodies). It is not clear to me as to Wright that we can abandon (or
that any consensus has abandoned) Tony Thiselton's magisterial
defense of overly realized eschatology (and, to a lesser extent,
problems between rich and poor) behind 1 Corinthians; neither of these
observations threatens Wright's reading of the key texts. John Wenham
may have tried to harmonize too much (and, refreshingly, Wright adopts
several key harmonizations of the Gospels' accounts), but Ladd's more
cautious harmonizations in his I Believe in the Resurrection of Jesus seem unassailable to me--another small lacuna in Wright's volume.

But these are mere quibbles. My overall response to a volume like
this is a combination of astonishment, awe, admiration (and not a
little bit of jealousy at Wright's gifts and brilliance!), but most of
all profound gratitude for his commitments to both scholarship and the
church (as his recent appointment as the new bishop of Durham further
attests). Doubtless many studies of resurrection will continue to be
written; it seems inconceivable that any will prove nearly as important
and convincing for a long, long time.